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Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."

Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.

Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.

This report is... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.

Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.

This report is... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.

They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.

They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.

I think you misunderstand the scale we're talking about. There are comparatively few hydrodelectric dams in North America compared to the number of wind turbines being discussed here. The difference in number is _vast_.

> Most people whining about......environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives.

You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...

Indeed. WRT nuclear power plants, I can't say I'm all _that_ impressed by 4th gen. Water cooling is a pretty horrible way to go, very expensive, plus it limits your site selection at the same time it forces your site to be dangerous to locate on - it MUST

The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.

You mean like Senator Ted Kennedy (www.boston.com):

...But, it turns out, Kennedy's antipathy to furtive rules changes and backroom power plays stops at the water's edge -- specifically, the waters of Nantucket Sound, which separates Cape Cod (where the Kennedy family has an oceanfront compound in Hyannis Port) from the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. A shoal in the center of Nantucket Sound is where Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation's first offshore wind farm -- an array of 130 wind turbines capable of generating enough electricity to meet 75 percent of the Cape and Islands' energy needs, without burning any oil or emitting any pollution. The turbines would be miles from any coastal property, barely visible on the horizon. In fact, Cape Wind says they would be farther away from the nearest home than any other electricity generation project in Massachusetts.

But like a lot of well-to-do Cape and Islands landowners and sailing enthusiasts, Kennedy doesn't want to share his Atlantic playground with an energy facility, no matter how clean, green, and nearly unseen. Last month he secretly arranged for a poison-pill amendment, never debated in either house of Congress, to be slipped into an unrelated Coast Guard bill. It would give the governor of Massachusetts, who just happens to be a wind farm opponent, unilateral authority to veto the Cape Wind project.

Not so simple. As I recall, it was NOT boaters that were the big factor it was the small businesses and fishermen who raised hell over the Cape Cod wind farm with funding from the rich pricks who don't want to see them. Kennedy was being the good representative he is by keeping his voters happy by doing what they want - a SIMILAR issue came up with the fishermen getting upset over federal fishing regulations limiting them on their overfishing. Kennedy got them what they demanded and now many are out of business because fish populations continued due to the predictable decrease from their overfishing. They got what they deserved BOTH TIMES and would have hated their representative for trying to inject any wisdom to the contrary.

I think its sad the way people shift blame to their representatives for THEIR OWN MISTAKES and wonder why the ones that tell them what they want to hear and throw a bone to the loudest groups. They get their power regardless of what they do on side issues (good or bad...) Some do good and some do bad but nearly ALL play politics where they must to get in and stay in. This is why you can't touch the corrupt farm lobbies or do much about all the welfare states (which are BTW all the 2004 "red" states.)

People SAY they don't want waste etc; but when their rep brings waste into town-- they REWARD them with re-election. Sure I want nuclear energy-- but not in my backyard...

Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines? It is a nice mental exercise to cover all the world's non-aquatic, non-forested, non-urban, and non-polar land with wind turbines, but do wind turbines really integrate well with all the other rural land uses (particularly agriculture) that we have?

Many farmers are making a _killing_ off of leasing their land for wind turbines. Some are only able to keep their farms going _because_ of the wind turbine land leases. So yeah, it works pretty well, actually.:)

The problem is that "dirty power" can be cleaner than "green power" overall in some circumstances.

I've never seen that proved. The real cleanliness of dirty power hasn't been calculated yet (and likely _can't, except theoretically), since we have not been able to clean the environment of the true impact of dirty power. Until you can capture all that CO2 that nobody has been worrying about for decades, you don't even know the scope of what dirty power is really doing.

Helen Fraser and her husband lived just over 400 metres from a turbine. She says the sound and strobing effect caused her to develop headaches and body aches, and her caused her husband's diabetes to get worse.

Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining how diabetes is influenced by a big windmill. I suppose she could be ranting and raving about the turbine so much that her husband's stress levels affected his diabetes.

Oh I read a nice study on the impact of high voltage lines on the health of people leaving below.
The study showed a correlation between the presence of these lines and strange health diseases.... even when the lines where powered down... Nocebo effect is the worst thing to fight.

It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.

It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.

Personally I use copper wire to move electrons from place to place. My state runs partly on hydro electricity from Tasmania, 200km to the south across a substantial body of water. Apparently the submarine cable which does the job only carries electrons in one direction. The return path is through the water, which comes built in with charge carriers.

That's an interesting position, because apparently Tasmania is a net importer of power across the Basslink cable - so you aren't actually 'partially fueled by hydro power' so much as 'distributing fossil power to a state that doesn't have the hydro resources to fuel itself'.

http://www.basslink.com.au/ [basslink.com.au] cites: In its first year of operation Basslink supplied 1920GWh to Tasmania and 450GWh to the National Electricity Market.

Single Wire Earth Return is a standard way to distribute electrical power to remote places in my country. The current density in the return path is very low because the medium which carries it has a high cross sectional area.

Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.

The answer to this is fuel cell plants powered by hydrogen derived from electrolysis. Supplemented by nuclear baseload power if desired.
There have been some good advances in cheaper electrolysis latley.

Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.

Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.

The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.

Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day. If you have a fairly efficient electricity grid you won't even need to store that much because the chances are it will be windy in some place within reach.

On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.

Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.

I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them

Unfortunately a study of the weather across the whole of Europe showed that the number of calm days covering significant areas of Europe are such that we would have several blackouts a year, even taking into account storage of the electricity.

What we need is reliable renewable power, and in the UK that means tidal barrages in the Seven, the Mersey and the Conwy at least.

Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people. I know they are excluding forests. but just because you don't have to cut down a tree doesn't mean it isn't a spot worth preserving.

Personaly I think that we really ought to build more nuclear power plants. Yes there is waste but overall it is fairly clean and cheap and would do more for preserving the environment and supplying electricity than this would.

The basic answer is, "a really long time," because the main power source for the wind arises from the sun, rather than the rotational energy of the Earth. Tides leach much more rotational energy, and they've been at work for over 4 billion years.

The thing that always seems to concern me is this: is it possible for the large amount of energy pulled from the winds to change weather patterns even slightly? I know it sounds stupid, but could even a very slight change over the planet potentially have an impact? Perhaps it is safest that we diversify our energy production. So much wind, solar, atomic etc.

For "sustainable" (ie we have a long term supply that we can't imagine exhausting) non-fusion-based energy, we're pulling the energy out of the ecosystem regardless. Solar and wind have more or less the same impacts, albeit at different points in the cycle. Wind impacts are problem more friendly than solar simply because the cross-section is vertical and blocks very little sunlight, whereas solar is largely lateral and therefore can't be implemented where there's a significant amount of vegetation without

Nulcear YES
Wind YES
Oil YES
Solar YES
Coal YES
Natural Gas YES
Tidal YES
There is no one size fits all people! You 'open minded' people need to open your minds to the real problems and solutions we already have available!

I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms where there's plenty of room, plenty of wind, and no neighbours to object.

I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms

I think the keyword here is "vast."

The permanent offshore rig is more or less a terminal.

Impressive in size - but still a single, relatively compact, structure. That is not going to be true of a wind farm.

This article doesn't mention anything about mass energy storage. Without that, if we try to increase wind's share of power generation too much, it'll destabilize the grid (I've heard figures of 20-30% for this previously, but can't find a convenient reference).

From TFA: "despite these limitations, it is clear that wind power could make a significant contribution to the demand for electricity"

I don't think they're saying that the would should be entirely wind-powered. They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.

Scientists confirmed today that Global Slowing is real. After years of speculation, it's now been confirmed that our harnessing of wind power for our energy needs is slowing the Earth down, and within a matter of decades, the Earth will come to a complete stop. Scientists are currently unsure whether this Global Slowing can be reversed, but some have proposed using fossil fuels to create artificial wind to help the Earth keep moving.

Sure, wind could do it. So could solar, if we spot a shitload of solar cells all over the world cover a decent portion of it.

But is it practical? It seems like people are perfectly fine dismissing "clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream, technology doesn't exist, etc., and then turning around and throwing scheme's like these out there as perfectly reasonable.

Building a wind turbine is proven, and cost effective. "Clean coal" or as we call it in real life, bullshit, has yet to be proven as either successful or economically viable. The faster we drive a stake through coal's heart, the better.

The summary of the numbers in that article (replacing US coal-burning plants with offshore east coast windmills):

So, we have, just for the towers nacelles and fans:- A workforce of 170,000 people, just to work at the plants to construct them.- 120 huge factories to construct.- Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep.- Construct those towers, nacelles and fans at the rate of one every 8 minutes for 40 years, in the Atlantic Ocean.- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).

It gets more ludicrous than that, when you consider continental shelf, keeping shipping lanes open, etc.

Admitted, adding on-shore windmills would be more doable, but still - it is quite pricey and impractical.

Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?

The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year [worldometers.info]. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.

Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep

The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.

I don't necessarily consider this pricey or resource intensive when you realize that what is proposed in nothing short of replacing roughly 100 years of nationwide power generation infrastructure, from scratch, in 40 years. Attempting to do that, with any technology, is what is ridiculous (though nuclear might be up to the challenge, haven't seen the numbers). That and attempting to do it with energy generation limited exclusively to the east coast, introducing insurmountable (or at least unnecessarily difficult to surmount) obstacles to distribution. Oh, and essentially barricading the entire eastern seaboard. So, yeah, it's a bad idea, but not because it costs $10.4 trillion and requires 170,000 people for 40 years.

It bothers me when people talk about our energy "needs", as though without some particular number of number of Watts, the world ends.

Are they better considered our energy "wants at a given price point"?

When I hear "need", but don't hear a "for what" part soon after, I get suspicious. Was the term "energy needs" a rhetorical device introduced by governments or energy suppliers to distract from the fact that we can live on varying amounts of energy consumption.

When I hear "need", but don't hear a "for what" part soon after, I get suspicious. Was the term "energy needs" a rhetorical device introduced by governments or energy suppliers to distract from the fact that we can live on varying amounts of energy consumption.

Exactly. Especially seeing as how most of our so-called "energy needs" can be eliminated using existing technology. Using 3 tonnes of vehicle with the drag coefficient of a barn door to transport one person to the grocery store is not a need. Heating your non-insulated house so that you can walk around in shorts and a t-shirt in winter is not a need.

Geothermal does not have the pollution problem, does not have visual problem, the problem of messing with birds or whatever, and the latest technology allows them to drill geothermal wells in very low temperatures or dry wells by pumping water in to the earth, rather than needing to find a particular geothermal friendly area. Even if just limited to areas naturally conducive to geothermal, there is likly just as many areas in the World where geothermal can be built (if you include all the places you can not build wind turbines like the middle of a city). Best of all, it is 24 hours, always on energy using the same technology we already use for our oil based society (drills, turbines, etc). It is "shovel ready" and producing energy right now all over the World.

Can anyone give me something that beats all of that in terms of energy to cost (including environmental)?

Geothermal is far friendlier than fossil fuels or nuclear, but it does have alot of downsides - Complex machinery and processes, high water usage, high maintenance on the wells. All of those have a pollution aspect to them. Plus it's still releasing extra heat to the environment.

Paint them black and cover them with photovoltaic cells.What's that? Birds going 20-30mph should know how to differentiate between a white-painted wind turbine and the nearby decidedly white-looking clouds?

And...
How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?
To erect them?
Maintain them?
Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.
How do they expect the worlds energy demand to increase with increased access to energy?
What type of environmental impact would this network have?
Would it have a local/global impact on weather patterns?
These results definitely sound interesting enough to warrant looking into these questions.

The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines [wikipedia.org] still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.

Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.

That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power [technologyreview.com]" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current [wikipedia.org], transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.

It seems to me we'd have to rape the earth in a way most of us would consider fairly extreme to erect giant concrete towers on every square meter of ocean and land.

Not even close. In the US the Rock Mountains alone contain enough potential wind energy to power the 48 continuous states. I think that's what the Picken's Plan [ning.com] calls for. However the Southwest on up the Pacific Coast is also good. To the east from the Appalachians north to the Poconos and Catskill Mountains contains a lot as does offshore from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod. Unfortunately there are a lot of NAMBYs along the coast who don't want wind farms offshore. Kennedy is one of them fighting to stop wind farms in Cape Cod.

The ecolgical impact of billions of tonnes of raw materials being mined would be astronomical.

You have that with all sources of energy. If you don't want mining then you don't get energy.

"It seems to me we'd have to rape the earth in a way most of us would consider fairly extreme to erect giant concrete towers on every square meter of ocean and land. The ecolgical impact of billions of tonnes of raw materials being mined [to build windmills] would be astronomical."

We already mine and BURN over six billion tons of coal a year, That's one ton of coal for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Why does common sense and reason go out the window when people post on these stories? It's got to the stage where I feel like I'm arguing with young earth creationists.

There may be enough wind in the world to supply our need 40 times over, but is the cost of tapping the energy source competitive with the cost of coal, gas, or nuclear power?

All of this get subsidies, as well as pass costs to others. Coal slurry spills [waterworld.com] happen all too frequently. Mountain top removal [scientificamerican.com] contaminates a lot of land. As does uranium mining [sustainabilitank.info]. Without government subsidies [wsj.com] nuclear power isn't even profitable [cato.org]. Though natural gas [earth-stream.com] emits a lot less CO2 than coal when burned it releases a lot more methane, which is more than 20 tymes as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Then it needs pipelines to deliver it.

We know that there are all sorts of natural energy sources around us, but its the financial cost that keeps us from recovering it.

More like it's politics. If financial costs were that important there would be no nuclear power. As I said before even coal gets subsidies. "Chevron [grist.org] agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies". In "My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!' [youtube.com] Rep Edward Markey goes over some of the subsidies different energy sources get.

Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as all biofuel proposals: an upper energy density limit of 100W/m2 of photosynthesisable sunlight, before tackling the problem of putting energy into the biomass to get your product out. You still need an absurd amount of installed capacity to even begin making a dent in any country's energy requirement with it. That being said, it looks orders of magnitude better than almost any other biofuel proposal.

Doesn't matter. You can erect five turbines and use the energy output from them to make a hundred more. With those hundred turbines you can make ten thousand. It's called a windfarm because that's where you breed new turbines.

Some wind turbine designs are far more bird friendly than others. The standard "propeller" based designs tend to be pretty bad. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Pac Wind [pacwind.com] and Helix Wind [helixwind.com]) can be much more bird/bat friendly.

Yes, birds are important, however, I am more concerned about the energy in the wind.

If we go and build enough wind turbines to power the world (and its growing energy demands), that energy needs to come from somewhere. What happens to the global, regional, and local ecosystems if this energy is removed from wind. In other words, what happens if we reduce the winds blowing across the world?

Is it enough to alter air currents? Jet streams? What about the erosion, pollen distribution, and all the other things nature depends on the wind for that I can't think about right now.

Now, probably there is plenty of wind out there not to make an impact, but no one has even addressed this. Everyone thinks it is a magical energy source with NO negative consequences. I want to know if there are any, but no one seems to be worried. Is it an issue people are hiding to promote wind power? Or is it really insignificant?

Well... wind energy is mostly solar energy, like hydro, and frankly, fossil fuels. Basically, none of it matters anyway. It's all just one stupid big game to control and regulate access to energy since available and exploitable energy is the single requirement for increasing standards of living. Since you can't have any rich people without poor people, do the math. Why do rich people want to regulate easy access to energy? So that poor people will cook their food, clear their house, and fight their wars.

You have a really valuable argument that people should spend a lot of time worrying about. It's a real shame that most people won't see it, since it's posted anonymously. Wind [weatherquestions.com] is essentially created by heat from the sun. Using all these wind turbines will obviously make the sun go out.

The original article was suggesting that there is so much wind around that wind power is a viable power generation method, not that this should actually be done. There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.

Maybe with all the deforestation going on there's now too much wind? Maybe we need some way of slowing it down.

Thinking that taking energy from wind would change nothing is ignorant, blind and very stupid

Actually, it's a very realistic view. Wind power is not a closed system, energy is _constantly_ being put into it by the sun... at a grossly faster rate than we could actually siphon it off to make a significant difference. The total world power demands are, today, somewhere between 15-20 terawatts. Notwithstanding the technological hurdles that would be required to extract it, we could utilize that amount a hundred times over and it would not even be 1% of the total energy available.

"Like a lot of grand plans we do "in the name of science" nobody yet knows what throwing that many turbines up would do ecosystems around the world. It's a lot of energy to be robbing from systems that depend on that energy."

Most of the wind energy in the atmosphere is in the bottom 5,000m, the largest wind turbines are only 100m tall (about as tall as the largest trees which are much more effective at damping SURFACE winds), "robbing" the energy of the wind is the least of our problems. As for birds, modern prop turbines move slowly and kill fewer birds than the same number of high rise buildings with mirrored windows.

Now, probably there is plenty of wind out there not to make an impact, but no one has even addressed this. Everyone thinks it is a magical energy source with NO negative consequences. I want to know if there are any, but no one seems to be worried. Is it an issue people are hiding to promote wind power? Or is it really insignificant?

I've been raising this point, around here especially, whenever a wind-power topic comes up. Generally, you're right: Not too many folks're interested, and a few are downright hostile to the notion. It'd be nice to see some peer-type-reviewed studies, or at least computer modeling, before we test it head-first. I suspect any such thing would, as usual, be ignored by those it opposes and embraced by those it favors, with no real political impact regardless. But at least I'd go from "vaguely worried" to either "somewhat relieved" or "a crank with citations".

I'm honestly totally neutral to the idea since I'm a scientist, and I don't really have any personal stake in the answer. However, I have done a lot of reading about many things like this.

People have seen a measurable local temperature increase near the ground due to lower winds -- similar to a city heat island. We are talking about a degree or two C locally, right where the windmill is, not an extended area effect.

Furthermore, the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere are theoretically increasing the amount of energy in the atmospheric system (increased hurricanes, etc). It seems rather unlikely on the face of it that removing energy from the atmosphere will cause a problem that more than offsets the problems from greenhouse gases, although it's certainly a valid thing to look into.

In any event, here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for you. The solar insolation is 1366 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, with ~500-1000 W/m^2 absorbed before it gets to the ground. The cross section of the earth is 127,400,000 km^2, giving a total power absorbed by the atmosphere in excess of 63700 TW. So, producing the total energy consumption of humans on earth (16TW) by energy removed from the atmosphere this way is talking about a 0.025% decrease in the atmospheric energy...

It's not impossible that this would cause problems, but this seems like a situation far less likely to lead to the extinction of mankind (or at least lots of animals that can't adapt fast enough) than global warming, and powering ourselves from wind removes a huge amount of political friction from the world, making a situation that is far less likely to lead to a nuclear holocaust... I think it's a matter of risk analysis... and unless someone did some pretty compelling modeling to demonstrate otherwise, I think I'll take my chances with too many calm summer days.

Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?

If human machines take energy from the wind, do work, and return waste heat to the atmosphere, then I think the cycle would repeat itself: The warmer air near the concentrations of machines (cities) would cause weather and wind just like the uneven heating of land and water does.

Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?

The energy in the wind would eventually dissipate as heat anyway (friction with land, ocean waves, etc). This is why the wind doesn't keep getting strong and stronger without limit. Wind power would actually lead to less net heat emission (0) than most other forms of energy production: fossil fuels and nuclear release energy previously stored away as something other than heat, geothermal speeds the heat release from the mantle, and solar decreases the earth's albedo. Hydro is less obvious... it seems heat neutral but it may even increase the albedo by forming new lakes.

To put this all in perspective, the world power consumption is something like 15 TW. The total amount of solar power incident on the earth is about 130,000 TW.

Actually buildings and cats kill many more birds than wind turbines do. The wind genies that killed a lot of birds are the old ones that spun fast, spun at high rpms. Modern genies [howstuffworks.com] spin slow and are safer.

The long term plan is to let evolution take its course. Eventually we'll be left with Ninja birds that have learned how to avoid wind turbine blades. These will then be put through further training to teach how to stop crapping on my car right after I've washed it.

In what way is solar not an option in Australia? We have HUGE amounts of unused land with high solar irradiation year round. Large scale solar-thermal with molten salt energy storage plants will provide more energy that you can use 24/7 if scaled up. The technology is here, it is proven, and environmentally responsible.

I *think* your opinion is based around obsolete designs. I'm not certain. Perhaps you have good reasons for your beliefs that you didn't mention. It's certain that I don't trust the messianic proponents of either wind or solar, but I do notice that the amount of investment in them has been increasing at a substantial rate over the last decade. To me that means that they must be at least close to sufficiently efficient. (I should have been cured of this belief by bio-ethanol for gasoline, but I haven't been, and consider that a statistical aberration cause by a strong political pressure group.)

If I'm wrong, could you please offer me a link to substantiate your opinions? Academic sources are preferred over either governmental or industrial.

The economy would go into the toilet and that would raise the real cost of power to even higher, and the demand would go down even more. By the end of the year we'd be all living in dirt huts. But, ya know, reality.. never let it get in the way of an indignant cause.

If you're concerned with reality, why not examine it rather than putting up a straw man?

A real solution would build out wind and solar resources over a number of decades, and wind down coal usage as the load gets shifted over.

Nobody is proposing anything remotely like forcibly converting the entire world to wind/solar within one year.

Australia does not depend wholly on coal, you know. In fact, wind power generation is increasing by a large amount.

How do I know this? My brother works at the wind farm on the south coast of south-eastern South Australia (it's near a place called Millicent). He is currently working extremely long hours constructing yet another batch of turbines. This is the second batch he's worked on in only a few years, and both batches are huge (we're talking dozens of turbines, not just a handful). So, it's not some feel-good experiment, it's a full-fledged economically-viable business.

As for solar energy, Australia has so much sunlight we'd have to be crazy not to make use of it. I know there are problems with transmission if you put a big solar plant out in the middle of nowhere, but that's not what I'm talking about. Think about all of the roofs in all of the cities - not just residential, either. How much solar energy is being wasted just bouncing off of the corrugated iron roofs of warehouses and factories? Put solar collectors on them, and they'd probably generate more power than they'd use - at least during the day, and most factories shut down at night.

Solar collectors may only run during the day, and may lose efficiency during cloudy days, but consider this - when is the single biggest draw time? Summer, during the day, when all those air conditioners are running. This also happens to be when the skies are clearest and the solar radiation received at its highest - therefore when the solar collectors would be at their most efficient.

Yes, we may not be able to just ban coal - yet. But we can easily reduce the dependence on it if we look outside the box, and don't just bag alternatives out of hand.